the title of my talk today is
transforming wastes into resources and
Haiti and I know that when everyone
hears Haiti the first thing to jump to
mind is the earthquake of last year and
I am going to speak about the earthquake
but before I get to that I want to take
us a little farther back in Haitian
history and talk about how it is that a
country that once produced two-thirds of
Europe’s tropical produce in the late
1700s went from an incredibly rich
agricultural country to a place where
67% of children are malnourished to a
country where today 54% of food is
imported agricultural production has
dropped 20% in the last decade so these
are some pretty shocking statistics and
in 15 minutes I’m only going to be able
to graze the surface but I want to start
out by talking about something that I
always start my talks with because I
feel like it’s very rarely mentioned and
it’s a very important historical factor
in understanding how it is the Haiti has
come to be this way today one of the
things that you hear a lot about Haiti
is about the tremendous environmental
destruction and this is absolutely true
and in fact only 3.8 percent of Haiti’s
once very lush forests now remain intact
and when we talk about this we often
talk about deforestation due to charcoal
production for cooking stoves and this
is absolutely one of the modern-day
factors contributing to deforestation
but something that is very rarely
mentioned are the historical roots of
this deforestation this is a pretty
famous photo and it’s often used when
comparing Haiti to the Dominican
Republic and there’s a lot of good
reasons that are cited for this
difference on the same island but one of
the reasons that’s
sited and that’s very rarely discussed
is the fact that what you’re seeing here
are actually the environmental scars of
extremely different post colonial
histories in 1825 after Haiti won their
independence from France the French
government forced the Haitian government
to pay reparations on the order of 20
1.7 billion dollars in today’s currency
and that debt took Haiti over 100 years
to pay off and during that time Haiti
chopped down over 50% of their forests
and that wood went to build Paris
instead of port-au-prince so when you
hear these statistics about Haiti I
think it’s very important to have this
perspective because I feel like it’s
often framed in such a way that would
make you think that Haitians have not
been good stewards of their environment
and I think it’s important to know this
post colonial history so with that I’m
going to move us a little farther
forward in time this photo was taken in
2004 on my first trip to Haiti and as an
ecologist as I was flying in the very
first thing that I noticed was this sort
of brown lip that goes all the way
around the edge of the country and I
said okay well that’s what’s happening
to Haiti’s rich agricultural soil it’s
running off into the sea because of
deforestation and Haiti’s actually
losing thirty six point six million
metric tons of soil per year and just to
give you a comparison and the UK the
erosion rate is about 2.2 million metric
tons so an extreme erosion rate but as I
spent more time in Haiti I came to
realize that this brown lip that you see
around the edge of the country is not
only soil there’s actually something
else that’s going into the ocean and
turning at that color and what that is
is human waste Haiti has by far the
lowest sanitation coverage in the
Western Hemisphere and one of the lowest
in the world in rural areas only 16% of
the population have ax
to a toilet and in urban areas that
percentage is only 35% so the vast
majority of Haitians do not have access
to a toilet and are forced to go to the
bathroom outside in the bushes in rivers
and canals or in plastic bags which are
then thrown into abandoned lots or into
the water this is a pretty typical
looking canal Institute so they in
port-au-prince and what you can see here
is is that algal growth which is
actually caused by excessive nutrients
from human wastes that are going into
the canal now even in places where there
is sanitation in place it’s often poorly
designed or poorly placed so you can see
this latrine here and then you see that
it is built just over this river where
many people get their drinking and
bathing water so all of the human wastes
that are going into this latrine are
filtering down and into the water supply
where it can then affect humans
this photo is another example this is a
very nice hospital in the central
plateau in Haiti that I visited and they
had these great flush toilets and so I
said well what happens when you flush
that water and they took me out back and
showed me this giant hole and I said it
all runs off into this hole here and you
can see by the depth of this that at
certain times of year when there’s rain
the groundwater rises and mixes directly
with that sewage and this is the reason
that waterborne illness is the leading
cause of death in children under five in
Haiti and last year in October Haiti had
their first-ever cholera outbreak which
has since claimed over 6,000 lives
so poor sanitation is really one of the
leading causes of death in Haiti and
something that’s often overlooked Haiti
is a country with absolutely zero sewage
treatment and prior to the earthquake
there was not even a legal dumping site
anywhere in the country for human waste
so when septic tanks or latrines were
emptied they’re being emptied into
rivers onto the ground just outside of
the city
Yunos
of organized way after the earthquake
when lots of organizations flooded into
the country and began doing sanitation
work there was a lot of pressure on the
government to identify a legal site for
dumping and this was the site just
outside of port-au-prince was which was
identified as a temporary site but is
still being used today a year and a half
later and this is the city dump where
all of the solid wastes from the city
come so the problem when you mix the
waste streams like this is that you have
a situation where people are coming to
scavenge in the solid waste to find
things to sell and then they’re being
exposed to human pathogens which were
being dumped initially they were dumping
almost 40,000 gallons a day from 50 to
75 of these trucks would come and
initially there were no holes or
anything so it was just being dumped
onto the ground and this photo was taken
in April of 2010 there was a period of
about two months where you actually
could not access the dump because there
were rivers of sewage running throughout
it in June of 2010 there was a slight
improvement made there were two giant
pits dug at the end of the dump and you
can see those up in the upper right hand
corner of this satellite image and this
is better in that people who were
scavenging were somewhat isolated from
the human waste however if you look at
this satellite image you can see that
those pits are only 600 meters from the
Bay of port-au-prince and you can see
these sort of brown plumes going out
towards the sea and those are human
waste untreated running off into the Bay
of port-au-prince as an ecologist one of
the first things that I thought about
after seeing this brown lip around Haiti
is is there a way to recapture those
nutrients that are running off into
aquatic ecosystems and making people
sick damaging the environment and get
them back on to the land in a way that
they can help to re-establish that
agricultural vitality of Haiti and one
of the ways to do this is through the
process of composting which is what I’m
going to focus the rest of my talk on
our first two talks today talked about
food and I’m also going to talk about
food but I’m going to talk about instead
of it going in I’m going to talk about
it coming out the other end so it’s all
part of the same cycle and I will end up
back with food so what we do is we build
ecological toilets of Haiti my
organization is called soil and it was
founded in 2006 and we built a special
kind of toilet called a urine diversion
toilet so if you look at this seat when
you sit down on it the pee goes one way
and then the poop falls down into a 15
gallon drum underneath the toilet and
each time you poop instead of flushing
with water which is a very scarce
resource hard to come by in most places
in Haiti instead of flushing with water
you take a handful of some sort of dry
organic material and you use that to
cover up the poop so that it doesn’t
smell and so that you don’t get flies
attracted to it now this is one of our
first toilets that we built in Haiti and
the way that it works is that the seat
is elevated over a cement chamber there
and the urine is diverted back into this
drum behind the toilet and urine I don’t
know if anyone’s ever heard it called
liquid gold before but it actually is
liquid gold urine has most of the
nutrients in human waste so all those
things that we’re eating that we just
don’t need we passed right back out of
our bodies those nutrients are mostly
contained in urine and urine does not
have the pathogens that are in the poop
so if you can take that urine and dilute
it with water it can actually be used
directly as a fertilizer and is a great
free fertilizer source we’re all making
it the poop falls down into this chamber
underneath the toilet and when the
chamber fills up you actually move the
toilet seat over to that second chamber
you seal the first one and by the time
the second one fills up you can empty
that first chamber and it’s already
decomposed into something that doesn’t
look or smell like poop anymore so in
the first three years that our
organization worked in Haiti we built
about 55 public toilets and communities
that otherwise would have no access to
sanitation
then in January of 2010 there was the
earthquake which changed everyone’s
lives in Haiti and took the lives of
over 200,000 people in the capital I was
living in cap-haitien in northern Haiti
at the time and I had a group of
students from the University of Miami
with me and two days later they were
able to be evacuated and we took about
half of our team from cap-haitien we
packed a bag we said we’re going to
port-au-prince we’ll be back in three
days and I’ve actually been living in
port-au-prince ever since so for about a
year and a half pound when we first got
there we really focused on just direct
emergency relief which was something
that we had never done before but it was
amazing the way that everyone who had
survived really banded together to to
help people who were suffering and we
distributed food we distributed water we
did transport of victims and then in
March of 2010 we were approached by
Oxfam Great Britain and they said do you
think you could do a pilot project in
the camps and port-au-prince with your
toilets and initially I said no way we
don’t we don’t do emergency work we
don’t really work in urban areas like
this and I’m not convinced that this
technology is going to be appropriate
for a situation like this well they were
very persistent and I’m glad that they
were because we finally agreed to try
the project and within six months we put
in 200 public toilets and 31 camps
throughout the city serving about 20,000
people and if you look at this toilet
you can see we made some modifications
to for the emergency we built them out
of wooden tarps instead of cement so
that when people began to move out of
the camps we can dismantle the toilets
and and take them out you also see that
this toilet is being used as a
clothesline and it’s something I want to
point out because one of the things that
our team is most proud of is the fact
that people in the camps where we have
these toilets really say these are the
nicest most comfortable least smelly
toilets that have been built in response
to the earthquake
in general you would not see people
hanging their clothes off of a latrine
because it usually you don’t want to get
anywhere near it
this is a picture of a camp committee
this is about a year after this toilet
was built and people still sit out of
them the steps all day they do their
homework there it’s actually a
relatively nice place to hang out we
also we made another modification that
was really important because in the
camps you have incredibly high usage so
instead of having these cement chambers
underneath the toilet we replaced that
with a 15 gallon plastic drum so each
time the drum fills up would poop you
can just seal it remove it and put in
another drum and then we we send the
soil poop mobile around so the
popemobile goes around once a week and
collects these full drums and replaces
them with empty drums and cover material
now we take the drums out to our compost
site where they’re dumped and they’re
mixed with sugarcane bagasse which is a
byproduct of REM production when the bin
is filled you cover it with a thick
layer of organic materials so flies
can’t access the compost and basically
we leave it there so it’s a it’s a
pretty low maintenance process according
to the w-h-o to safely treat human
wastes you need to achieve temperatures
of over a hundred and twenty degrees
Fahrenheit for a minimum of one week so
while the compost is in these bins we
take temperatures every few days and you
can see here that ones that 160 we’ve
had some of our piles actually reach
almost 200 degrees which is too hot
after we’re sure the pathogens have been
killed we transport the waste out and
put it in wind rows like this and it
takes another four to five months before
the composting process is complete and
at the end of that time we get this
incredibly rich fertile soil which
generally I would travel with it and I’d
be passing it around right now for you
to smell it but I I got a little nervous
about customs this time so I haven’t
come with a sample so I’m just gonna
finish up a really a really quick
example of what we’re we’re moving
towards is that we’re now moving back
into develop
and we’re working on designing a
household toilet model that could be
indoor/outdoor that basically looks like
a box so you wouldn’t know it was a
toilet and when you lift it you have the
toilet seat and underneath is a
five-gallon bucket that’s sealable what
we’re looking to do is to rent these
toilets for about one to three dollars
us a month people would pay this rental
fee and that’ll cover the collection
transport and treatment of the waste and
then compost sales can be used to
subsidize toilets for families who can’t
afford them so that’s sort of a sneak
preview of how waste can be transformed
into a resource and can become a
sustainable business for now I’ll just
leave you with the idea what we’re
imagining is is there a way to transform
this practice that’s making people sick
to take these nutrients and pathogens
that are polluting aquatic systems
causing a public health problem and to
get them back on to the soil where they
can be used for reforestation and
agriculture to help solve some of these
environmental and health problems thank
you all so much before I go I really
want to acknowledge my incredible team
that I work with in Haiti it’s an honor
for me to be here but certainly this
work would never have happened without
all of the support that I get and I
thank you all so much for coming
especially my parents who are here in
the front row thank you very much
you
you
transforming wastes into resources and
Haiti and I know that when everyone
hears Haiti the first thing to jump to
mind is the earthquake of last year and
I am going to speak about the earthquake
but before I get to that I want to take
us a little farther back in Haitian
history and talk about how it is that a
country that once produced two-thirds of
Europe’s tropical produce in the late
1700s went from an incredibly rich
agricultural country to a place where
67% of children are malnourished to a
country where today 54% of food is
imported agricultural production has
dropped 20% in the last decade so these
are some pretty shocking statistics and
in 15 minutes I’m only going to be able
to graze the surface but I want to start
out by talking about something that I
always start my talks with because I
feel like it’s very rarely mentioned and
it’s a very important historical factor
in understanding how it is the Haiti has
come to be this way today one of the
things that you hear a lot about Haiti
is about the tremendous environmental
destruction and this is absolutely true
and in fact only 3.8 percent of Haiti’s
once very lush forests now remain intact
and when we talk about this we often
talk about deforestation due to charcoal
production for cooking stoves and this
is absolutely one of the modern-day
factors contributing to deforestation
but something that is very rarely
mentioned are the historical roots of
this deforestation this is a pretty
famous photo and it’s often used when
comparing Haiti to the Dominican
Republic and there’s a lot of good
reasons that are cited for this
difference on the same island but one of
the reasons that’s
sited and that’s very rarely discussed
is the fact that what you’re seeing here
are actually the environmental scars of
extremely different post colonial
histories in 1825 after Haiti won their
independence from France the French
government forced the Haitian government
to pay reparations on the order of 20
1.7 billion dollars in today’s currency
and that debt took Haiti over 100 years
to pay off and during that time Haiti
chopped down over 50% of their forests
and that wood went to build Paris
instead of port-au-prince so when you
hear these statistics about Haiti I
think it’s very important to have this
perspective because I feel like it’s
often framed in such a way that would
make you think that Haitians have not
been good stewards of their environment
and I think it’s important to know this
post colonial history so with that I’m
going to move us a little farther
forward in time this photo was taken in
2004 on my first trip to Haiti and as an
ecologist as I was flying in the very
first thing that I noticed was this sort
of brown lip that goes all the way
around the edge of the country and I
said okay well that’s what’s happening
to Haiti’s rich agricultural soil it’s
running off into the sea because of
deforestation and Haiti’s actually
losing thirty six point six million
metric tons of soil per year and just to
give you a comparison and the UK the
erosion rate is about 2.2 million metric
tons so an extreme erosion rate but as I
spent more time in Haiti I came to
realize that this brown lip that you see
around the edge of the country is not
only soil there’s actually something
else that’s going into the ocean and
turning at that color and what that is
is human waste Haiti has by far the
lowest sanitation coverage in the
Western Hemisphere and one of the lowest
in the world in rural areas only 16% of
the population have ax
to a toilet and in urban areas that
percentage is only 35% so the vast
majority of Haitians do not have access
to a toilet and are forced to go to the
bathroom outside in the bushes in rivers
and canals or in plastic bags which are
then thrown into abandoned lots or into
the water this is a pretty typical
looking canal Institute so they in
port-au-prince and what you can see here
is is that algal growth which is
actually caused by excessive nutrients
from human wastes that are going into
the canal now even in places where there
is sanitation in place it’s often poorly
designed or poorly placed so you can see
this latrine here and then you see that
it is built just over this river where
many people get their drinking and
bathing water so all of the human wastes
that are going into this latrine are
filtering down and into the water supply
where it can then affect humans
this photo is another example this is a
very nice hospital in the central
plateau in Haiti that I visited and they
had these great flush toilets and so I
said well what happens when you flush
that water and they took me out back and
showed me this giant hole and I said it
all runs off into this hole here and you
can see by the depth of this that at
certain times of year when there’s rain
the groundwater rises and mixes directly
with that sewage and this is the reason
that waterborne illness is the leading
cause of death in children under five in
Haiti and last year in October Haiti had
their first-ever cholera outbreak which
has since claimed over 6,000 lives
so poor sanitation is really one of the
leading causes of death in Haiti and
something that’s often overlooked Haiti
is a country with absolutely zero sewage
treatment and prior to the earthquake
there was not even a legal dumping site
anywhere in the country for human waste
so when septic tanks or latrines were
emptied they’re being emptied into
rivers onto the ground just outside of
the city
Yunos
of organized way after the earthquake
when lots of organizations flooded into
the country and began doing sanitation
work there was a lot of pressure on the
government to identify a legal site for
dumping and this was the site just
outside of port-au-prince was which was
identified as a temporary site but is
still being used today a year and a half
later and this is the city dump where
all of the solid wastes from the city
come so the problem when you mix the
waste streams like this is that you have
a situation where people are coming to
scavenge in the solid waste to find
things to sell and then they’re being
exposed to human pathogens which were
being dumped initially they were dumping
almost 40,000 gallons a day from 50 to
75 of these trucks would come and
initially there were no holes or
anything so it was just being dumped
onto the ground and this photo was taken
in April of 2010 there was a period of
about two months where you actually
could not access the dump because there
were rivers of sewage running throughout
it in June of 2010 there was a slight
improvement made there were two giant
pits dug at the end of the dump and you
can see those up in the upper right hand
corner of this satellite image and this
is better in that people who were
scavenging were somewhat isolated from
the human waste however if you look at
this satellite image you can see that
those pits are only 600 meters from the
Bay of port-au-prince and you can see
these sort of brown plumes going out
towards the sea and those are human
waste untreated running off into the Bay
of port-au-prince as an ecologist one of
the first things that I thought about
after seeing this brown lip around Haiti
is is there a way to recapture those
nutrients that are running off into
aquatic ecosystems and making people
sick damaging the environment and get
them back on to the land in a way that
they can help to re-establish that
agricultural vitality of Haiti and one
of the ways to do this is through the
process of composting which is what I’m
going to focus the rest of my talk on
our first two talks today talked about
food and I’m also going to talk about
food but I’m going to talk about instead
of it going in I’m going to talk about
it coming out the other end so it’s all
part of the same cycle and I will end up
back with food so what we do is we build
ecological toilets of Haiti my
organization is called soil and it was
founded in 2006 and we built a special
kind of toilet called a urine diversion
toilet so if you look at this seat when
you sit down on it the pee goes one way
and then the poop falls down into a 15
gallon drum underneath the toilet and
each time you poop instead of flushing
with water which is a very scarce
resource hard to come by in most places
in Haiti instead of flushing with water
you take a handful of some sort of dry
organic material and you use that to
cover up the poop so that it doesn’t
smell and so that you don’t get flies
attracted to it now this is one of our
first toilets that we built in Haiti and
the way that it works is that the seat
is elevated over a cement chamber there
and the urine is diverted back into this
drum behind the toilet and urine I don’t
know if anyone’s ever heard it called
liquid gold before but it actually is
liquid gold urine has most of the
nutrients in human waste so all those
things that we’re eating that we just
don’t need we passed right back out of
our bodies those nutrients are mostly
contained in urine and urine does not
have the pathogens that are in the poop
so if you can take that urine and dilute
it with water it can actually be used
directly as a fertilizer and is a great
free fertilizer source we’re all making
it the poop falls down into this chamber
underneath the toilet and when the
chamber fills up you actually move the
toilet seat over to that second chamber
you seal the first one and by the time
the second one fills up you can empty
that first chamber and it’s already
decomposed into something that doesn’t
look or smell like poop anymore so in
the first three years that our
organization worked in Haiti we built
about 55 public toilets and communities
that otherwise would have no access to
sanitation
then in January of 2010 there was the
earthquake which changed everyone’s
lives in Haiti and took the lives of
over 200,000 people in the capital I was
living in cap-haitien in northern Haiti
at the time and I had a group of
students from the University of Miami
with me and two days later they were
able to be evacuated and we took about
half of our team from cap-haitien we
packed a bag we said we’re going to
port-au-prince we’ll be back in three
days and I’ve actually been living in
port-au-prince ever since so for about a
year and a half pound when we first got
there we really focused on just direct
emergency relief which was something
that we had never done before but it was
amazing the way that everyone who had
survived really banded together to to
help people who were suffering and we
distributed food we distributed water we
did transport of victims and then in
March of 2010 we were approached by
Oxfam Great Britain and they said do you
think you could do a pilot project in
the camps and port-au-prince with your
toilets and initially I said no way we
don’t we don’t do emergency work we
don’t really work in urban areas like
this and I’m not convinced that this
technology is going to be appropriate
for a situation like this well they were
very persistent and I’m glad that they
were because we finally agreed to try
the project and within six months we put
in 200 public toilets and 31 camps
throughout the city serving about 20,000
people and if you look at this toilet
you can see we made some modifications
to for the emergency we built them out
of wooden tarps instead of cement so
that when people began to move out of
the camps we can dismantle the toilets
and and take them out you also see that
this toilet is being used as a
clothesline and it’s something I want to
point out because one of the things that
our team is most proud of is the fact
that people in the camps where we have
these toilets really say these are the
nicest most comfortable least smelly
toilets that have been built in response
to the earthquake
in general you would not see people
hanging their clothes off of a latrine
because it usually you don’t want to get
anywhere near it
this is a picture of a camp committee
this is about a year after this toilet
was built and people still sit out of
them the steps all day they do their
homework there it’s actually a
relatively nice place to hang out we
also we made another modification that
was really important because in the
camps you have incredibly high usage so
instead of having these cement chambers
underneath the toilet we replaced that
with a 15 gallon plastic drum so each
time the drum fills up would poop you
can just seal it remove it and put in
another drum and then we we send the
soil poop mobile around so the
popemobile goes around once a week and
collects these full drums and replaces
them with empty drums and cover material
now we take the drums out to our compost
site where they’re dumped and they’re
mixed with sugarcane bagasse which is a
byproduct of REM production when the bin
is filled you cover it with a thick
layer of organic materials so flies
can’t access the compost and basically
we leave it there so it’s a it’s a
pretty low maintenance process according
to the w-h-o to safely treat human
wastes you need to achieve temperatures
of over a hundred and twenty degrees
Fahrenheit for a minimum of one week so
while the compost is in these bins we
take temperatures every few days and you
can see here that ones that 160 we’ve
had some of our piles actually reach
almost 200 degrees which is too hot
after we’re sure the pathogens have been
killed we transport the waste out and
put it in wind rows like this and it
takes another four to five months before
the composting process is complete and
at the end of that time we get this
incredibly rich fertile soil which
generally I would travel with it and I’d
be passing it around right now for you
to smell it but I I got a little nervous
about customs this time so I haven’t
come with a sample so I’m just gonna
finish up a really a really quick
example of what we’re we’re moving
towards is that we’re now moving back
into develop
and we’re working on designing a
household toilet model that could be
indoor/outdoor that basically looks like
a box so you wouldn’t know it was a
toilet and when you lift it you have the
toilet seat and underneath is a
five-gallon bucket that’s sealable what
we’re looking to do is to rent these
toilets for about one to three dollars
us a month people would pay this rental
fee and that’ll cover the collection
transport and treatment of the waste and
then compost sales can be used to
subsidize toilets for families who can’t
afford them so that’s sort of a sneak
preview of how waste can be transformed
into a resource and can become a
sustainable business for now I’ll just
leave you with the idea what we’re
imagining is is there a way to transform
this practice that’s making people sick
to take these nutrients and pathogens
that are polluting aquatic systems
causing a public health problem and to
get them back on to the soil where they
can be used for reforestation and
agriculture to help solve some of these
environmental and health problems thank
you all so much before I go I really
want to acknowledge my incredible team
that I work with in Haiti it’s an honor
for me to be here but certainly this
work would never have happened without
all of the support that I get and I
thank you all so much for coming
especially my parents who are here in
the front row thank you very much
you
you
Please follow and like us: